Political commentary

As near as dammit

Ferdinand Mount

There is something unconvincing about 1 the way Shirley Williams swears. The habit seems to be growing on her. Whenever she pops up to comment on this or that, she throws in a 'darn' or 'damn' or even, if deeply moved, a 'bloody'. These genteel expletives may not be generally counted as swear-words nowadays. But she means them as swear-words. They are not a natural part of Fabian Society patois, like effing and blinding are in the army. They are to show that she is a gutsy girl. The only trouble is that she gets them slightly wrong. She has a tin ear for the mildest oath.

Take her comments on the Croydon byelection: 'The Conservatives didn't do well, but, dammit, the Government's in dead trouble, spinning around in circles like a whirlpool.' The dammit is superfluous. In fact, it is counter-productive, because it implies that the Conservatives did do rather well, considering, which is not what she meant at all.

A certain amount of dammit-ing is to be observed all round in the varous interpretations offered of this, as of most byelections. Starting from the bottom up, the first over-emphasis we ought to correct is the claim that the result was uniquely disastrous for Labour. Dammit, if the Labour Party can't do better than that with three million unemployed . . . The truth is that Labour quite often does almost as badly as that at by-elections, except in the months immediately following a general election, as at Bromsgrove in 1971, the last time Labour gained a seat at a by-election.

What distinguishes the Alliance's triumph from the other mid-term Liberal triumphs over the past 20 years? Not the rise in the third party's share of the vote, which is slightly lower than at Edge Hill (1979), Isle of Ely (1973), Sutton and Cheam (1972), Ladywood (1969) and Orpington (1962). Nor is it entirely convincing to claim that only in Croydon was the thirdparty candidate a nobody who came from nowhere.

Much is made of Mr William Pitt losing his deposit at the last general election — but so did a lot of Liberal candidates. And in 1974, Mr Pitt rose along with the Liberal national vote to secure over 20 per cent. And he is not that much of a nonentity. He was a familiar figure, to me at least, from Liberal party conferences long before the by-election, rather more memorable in fact with his bristly aggressiveness than many of the local government officers and secondhand booksellers who stand as Liberals, year in and year out, and once in a lifetime get swept into Parliament by a following wind. Who now remembers Graham Tope or David Austick? All this is said not to minimise the impact of the Alliance's first elected member of parliament but to remind ourselves that the Social Democrats' forte is not (and was never supposed to be) attracting voters in the first place but hanging on to them. It is that consistent first place in the national opinion polls all this year and the slowly swelling numbers of MPs that are to consolidate their authority over those voters who say, 'Well, I thought I'd give that Alliance thing a try this time.'

Paradoxically then, what the Alliance now needs is not to prove that it can elect anyone to Parliament (the Liberals can do that quite nicely by themselves), but to start getting a few of their stars in. The SDP is a star vehicle, or it is nothing.

Mrs Williams has to win Crosby, dammit. On present form, she ought to manage it. But the importance placed upon her winning is a reminder of how fragile the Alliance itself imagines its hold over its supporters to be. There are just the faintest signs of a weakening in the SDP's lead in the opinion polls. The conference season, too, left behind an impression of the thinness of the SDP.

True, it also left behind, as it usually does, a far stronger impression of the ghastly sides of the Labour and Conservative parties. But the ghastly sides tend also to be the parts that are rooted in popular opinion. And you cannot help noticing on how many subjects and how emphatically the SDP is opposed to the popular prejudice, even more so than their Liberal partners.

Were there 250,000 or only 150,000 on the CND march, cheering Michael Foot and Tony Benn? The rebirth of unilateralism combined with mass unemployment has given Labour a great boost among the young. Recent polls suggest that, among the 18to 24-year-olds, Labour now outstrips the Tories and the Alliance put together. For many young people, it is precisely the fact that Labour now is not the party of Attlee and Gaitskell that makes it so attractive. The chance to vote, at least once in one's life, for a party that is a little sinister and might do something awful if elected is not to be missed.

On the other side, the Tories so far seem to be hanging on to what we in the trade call the 'tough-minded, blue-collar Ds and Es', commonly known as the Alf Garnetts who hope Mrs Thatcher will sort the buggers out. This substantial section of the populace can only have been heartened by the distinctly robust tone of the debate on law-and-order at the Tory Party Conference. It will take more than the intermittent `goshdarn' from Shirley to prise loose these tough nuts. In short, reports of the demise of both the Labour and the Conservative parties are somewhat exaggerated. It has been a constant theme in many places, including this' column, that the Labour Party is in a process of gradual but irreversible decline. But that does not prevent it from being able to snatch a general election victory on the way down. That possibility remains.

Which brings us to the Pym Scenario. Mr Francis Pym continues to go about claiming that the Alliance is 'taking more votes from' the Conservative than from Labour and therefore, unless the Government begins to look more moderate, there is a grave risk of 'another 1974', in which the SDP 'let in' an extremist Labour government led by Mr Benn.

Not for the first time with Mr Pym, I find the premises somewhat loosely stated. If there are at present more ex-Conservatives than ex-Labour supporters proposing to vote Alliance (which I'm not sure of), then that is because there are at present so many more ex-Conservatives. Their ex-ness is more relevant than their present address.

If the present polls were a reliable guide to the next general election, what would be threatened for the Conservatives would be not a 1974 but a 1945 or a 1906. If you believe the Tories are capable of doing a little better than that — as Mr Pym is supposed to believe, he's paid to — then it is precisely in marginals like Croydon N-W that the Alliance might keep Labour out.

Suppose that the two-party squeeze sends 5 per cent of the voters scurrying back from Mr Pitt to Labour and 5 per cent (or more if Mr Pym is right about the present ratio of defectors to the Alliance) scurrying back to the Tories, then the Conservatives would win in Croydon, even if Labour were still ahead nationally. On the other hand, Croydon might not be a flawless example, because a constituency takes a little time to eject 0 by-election winner who has made it famous.

Look here, do you feel we're going on a bit? Perhaps we should just say 'situation fluid' and leave it at that, or, as they say at half-time after a dreadful first 45 minutes, 'there's everything to play for'.

Students of form who want a little more to chew on may like to note the uri' mistakable signs of compromise now trick!' ing out of the Cabinet. The virtues of fudge are loudly bruited. Mr Leon Brittan repeats to anyone who stops to listen that public spending is to go up, not down next year. Mr Nick Edwards, the Welsh Secretary, 3 handy bellwether, speaks enthusiastically of fresh Government projects for capital spending with as much private participation as possible and a rather more relaxed view of the public sector borrowing requirement.

Now you wouldn't call that a — no, you wouldn't want even to use such a stale motoring analogy, would you? Let us weal( rather of a cons — no, sorry, of a coming together of the various strands in Conservative thinking to produce an entirely noir inflationary yet excitingly expansionarY economic strategy. No? Then let us simPlY say that Mrs Thatcher is also a politician.